Having access to data is a key tool in understanding the current state of school travel in Canada, enabling Active School Travel (AST) organizations, professionals, and advocates to accurately measure the impact of various interventions, identify opportunities for improvement, allowing practitioners to effectively advocate for investment using current data, and encouraging wider conversation and behaviour change.

Currently, there is a well documented knowledge gap in Canada as to how children and families travel to and from school each day. Although individual schools or school boards may on (very) rare occasions collect their own data on how their students are travelling to and from school, there is a distinct lack of current, ongoing, and statistically significant data available. This lack of data on rates and modes of school travel in communities across Canada makes it difficult to identify and articulate the scale of the issue, and correspondingly advocate for funding to support important infrastructure improvements and AST programming.

Canadian AST practitioners are often relying on data from a small number of municipalities that conduct surveys or research, dated academic studies, or from other countries such as the United States to make the case for investment in active and safe routes to school interventions. In an effort to understand and identify improved processes for school travel data collection in Canada, this report describes:

• Data collection methods currently used by AST researchers and programs
• across Canada.
• Identification of best practices in Data Collection in Canada as summarized
• from stakeholder interviews.
• Recommended approaches for School Travel Data Collection for the Ontario context.
• Recommendations for future data collection and research at the Provincial and National level.
• Identification of future research and study in this realm that should be conducted as funding and capacity permit.